The Exchange: Charles Bowden on Juárez, “Murder City”

For fifteen years, Charles Bowden has been writing about Juárez, the Mexican border city of 1.5 million whose name is synonymous with faceless, all-consuming violence. It’s a place where death has a gravitational pull, where people disappear and bodies appear with mundane frequency. Most recently, the violence—a grim fact of life for Mexicans, and a sensationalist distraction for most Americans—garnered headlines here when three people tied to the U.S. consulate were brutally gunned down.

Your writing style is spare and matter-of-fact, almost impressionistic. Can you explain the choice to write this way, rather than in a more “straightforward,” or descriptive journalistic manner? Was the style driven by a need for anonymity, or did you have other motivations?

If you read the newspaper accounts of violence in Juárez, they fail to convey the pain, the fear, and the ruin of the city. I wrote of murders, tortures, and rapes in a spare manner because a flat tone conveys agony better than a herd of adjectives. Many people in the book are unnamed lest they be killed. For example, one person in the book was filmed later by a documentary maker. When I mentioned this to a friend of mine, a lifelong resident of Juárez, he was very upset. He said, “That footage could get the man killed.”

Juárez has been a rough place for sometime now, but you pinpoint January 2008—when Felipe Calderon became president and began to engage the Mexican army in the so-called war on drugs—as the city’s definitive tipping point. Do you think the violence would decrease if Calderon disengaged the military? Are there other changes that could positively affect the situation, or is the culture of killing simply too pervasive at this point?

The year 2007, with three hundred and seven murders, was the bloodiest in the history of the city—about twenty-six killings a month. January 2008 had over forty—the total for the year ran one thousand six hundred and sixty. In 2009, two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three were killed. This year, as of the morning of May 18th, nine hundred and seventy-three had been slaughtered—a sixty-per-cent increase over the same period in 2008. Federal agents and the army have poured in during the same twenty-seven-month period, and as they arrive the killings rise.

There are five hundred to nine hundred street gangs now of armed, murderous, unschooled and unemployed young people. The drug industry is thriving—even the D.E.A. admits drugs have never been cheaper, of higher quality, or more widespread in the U.S. Nothing can immediately roll back the violence, because it is now part of the fabric of the city, a place where in two years twenty-five per cent of the houses have been abandoned, forty per cent of the business shuttered, at least a hundred thousand jobs lost, and where a hundred and four thousand people have fled. Three things would over time lower the slaughter of people in Juárez and all over Mexico: legalize drugs, rework NAFTA so it provides a living wage, protect workers from toxic materials, protect unions, and cease giving the Mexican army half a billion dollars a year: it is the largest criminal group in Mexico and a growing player in the drug industry.

You have said that the killings in Juárez don’t have a “center,” that contrary to conventional wisdom they are not all tied to the drug trade or human trafficking. Instead, you argue that the abuses of free trade have spawned an unstoppable culture of violence. For those who haven’t read your work, can you explain this idea? In your opinion, is it simply the lack of economic opportunity that has led to violence, or is it something more insidious and pervasive—a state of mind?

I’ll make this simple: there are four hundred foreign, mainly American, factories in Juárez, they pay at best seventy-five dollars a week, the cost of living in Juárez is about ninety per cent of what it would be on the U.S. side of the border. In addition to this obvious point—that the factories play slave wages and have a turnover on average of one hundred to two hundred per cent a year—the city has now had at least two generations of kids raised pretty much on their own as their parents work five and a half days a week in the factories. It was primed to explode. Calderón’s initiative using the army to prove his power became the match in the powder keg, and now no single capo or general of politicians can put out the fire.

The president of Mexico says ninety per cent of the dead—over twenty-four thousand in Mexico since he launched his program—are dirty, meaning somehow connected to drugs. This statement is false. Most of the dead are poor people, not capos. And besides, what does it mean to be “dirty” in a city of a million that harbors one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand addicts?

In “Murder City,” you express frustration at the focus on violence against women in Juárez, rather than the disintegration of the city as a whole. Why do you think the news media and Hollywood are so interested in these types of crimes? As reprehensible as it is, is the story of violence against women easier to accept—and to take a stand against—than the sort of systemic rot you you write about?

I’m told that seventeen films—commercial and documentaries—have been made about the murder of woman in Juárez. They are a way to avoid both facts and the city. The murder rate of women in Juárez over the past fifteen years is about the same as Mexico in general—about ten per cent of all homicides. The cases are never solved; neither are the cases of the men who comprise ninety per cent of the murders—see the documentary “Presumed Guilty” which came out in late 2008. Juárez kills everyone—in fact during this recent explosion which has made the city the most violent on earth, the percentage of women murdered has declined to about six per cent of the slaughtered. The U.S. average is twenty-one per cent. Juárez is a product of many things: Mexican corruption, a key crossing point for the drug industry, a failing economy. But at the bottom is poverty in a city that was and to some still is the poster child for NAFTA.

Though Arizona does not border Juárez, do you expect their new immigration laws will have any impact on the city? What if more states—particularly Texas—follow suit? I can’t imagine that the laws would help.

The Arizona immigration law will spread. It is part of a xenophobic wave, and such eruptions are common in our history when massive migration—whether legal or illegal—occurs. It will have little or no effect on the migration itself, because the movement north of Mexicans is driven by relentless poverty. Like the federal wall on the border, it is a creation of domestic political needs and has little or nothing to do with the migration itself or the failure of our free-trade theology.

Your subtitle refers to Juárez as the “Global Economy’s New Killing Field.” What do you see as the next killing field? Are there other cities, in Mexico or elsewhere, likely to follow Juarez’s descent?

The violence is not just on the border in Mexico, it is spreading. The migration north comes from all over Mexico. Labor protests in China are growing. The global economy is capital short. The E.U. is slapping band-aids on the euro. There is nothing on the horizon that promises social peace, and many things that suggest unrest. Juárez for decades has been a laboratory for free-trade ideas. The murder of five thousand three hundred people in twenty-seven months is part of the lab report. Since this threatens U.S. policy and Chamber of Commerce theology, it must be ignored. That is why regardless of what happens in Mexico it is spoken of as a drug war in the U.S.

At the risk of sounding like the cubicle-bound writer that I (mostly) am, can you talk a bit about the challenges of reporting a subject as dangerous as this one? You have said that Juárez is a city where if you’re in need of help, there’s no one to call. How do you report in an environment like that?

I have trouble with this question. The way I was trained up, reporters went toward the story, just as firemen rush toward the fire. It is a duty. As it happens, I am a coward and would rather write about a bird or a tree. But, I don’t know how to be aware of such a slaughter and not report it. As for safety, the Mexican press is being slaughtered, not the U.S. That is why the book is dedicated to a Mexican reporter murdered November 13th, 2008. That is why one of the main characters in the book is a Mexican reporter now seeking political asylum in the US. They’ve really put their lives on the line, not guys like me.

I have never read it. After the actual Juárez, I don’t have much appetite for a fictional Juárez, so I have no opinion. At the moment, I am reading “The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South” by Donald Holley, a monograph on the revolution caused by the mechanical cotton picker—it hasn’t got any sicarios in it.